please help me welcome, martin amis. [music] >> good evening. elmore leonard. let us attempt to narrow it down. elmore leonard is the literary genius who writes, re-readable thrillers. he belongs there not in the main stream but to the general on -- fiction on the whole relies on plot, has only a dozen plots to read. boy meets girl, good meets bad and so on. but mr. leonard has only one movement all his thrillers or re-workers of tales, in which death roams the land, usually miami or detroit, disguised as money. nevertheless, mr. leonard possesses gifts, timing and phrasing, ear and eye, that even the most snobbish masters of the main stream must earnestly covet. and the question is, how does he allow these gifts play in his efficient, unpretentious and yarns about semi literate mobsters, gangsters, cocktail waitresses, lone sharks, bouncy hunters, and syndicate executioners. the essence of elmore is to be found in the use of the present participle. he has discovered the way to slow down the english sentence, or let's say the american sentence, because mr. leon